411 Games Top 5 12.14.12: Top 5 Disappointments of 2012

Hello everyone, I hope it has been a good week for all the readers out there, you know you were disappointed by something this year.

Stephen Randle (Quizmaster of the Four Player Co-op & Writer of Wrestling News Experience in Wrestling Zone)

5. WoW Has Pandas – Specifically, WoW put Pandarians into their game three years after everyone I know quit playing and I really, really want to play a Panda but I won’t have any friends there so I’ll just get bored once I hit the level cap and can’t go raiding. Curse you, Blizzard! Actually, it’s been a bad year for me and Blizzard all around…but we’ll get into that later.

4. The Mass Effect 3 Ending – I actually don’t know what it is, I only just finished Mass Effect 2 last week. But I do have in on good authority from friends that I should be angry with how the game and trilogy end, so I guess I am. Actually, I’m just worried now, because ME2 was so awesome that I know I have to play ME3, and all the vitriol directed towards it after release has already set me up for crushing disappointment.

3. I Can’t Get Hyped For The Wii U – When the Wii came out, I knew I had to have one. Sure, there weren’t any games for it except for the Wii Sports pack-in, and I couldn’t really afford it, and I didn’t really have the space for motion-control gaming in my one-room student apartment. But I was hyped, and I had to have it. It was the first time I’ve ever done the whole “go to every store in the city looking for one” thing. And I wasn’t disappointed. So why can’t I get excited about the Wii U, no matter how much I try?

2. Final Fantasy Slips Into Irrelevance – As a guy who could easily put half a dozen FF games into his Top 100 Favourite games, watching the series degenerate into muddled messes with confusing stories and odd gameplay choices has been hard, and the year-long mess that has been trying to fix Final Fantasy XIV, as well as the stubborn insistence that Final Fantasy Versus XIII will be released someday (all influenced, I’ll admit, with my new-found appreciation of Atlus’ surging Persona series), has pretty much sunk any hope I had in Square Enix recapturing the glory of the old days. In 2012, I’ve gone from anticipating the next Final Fantasy to dreading what they’ll do to it next.

1. My Most Anticipated Games of 2012 Were Definitely Not My Best of 2012 – The first one is, obviously, Diablo III, which provided some hours of fun and then a discovery that there wasn’t any reason to keep playing, leading to the depressing realization that one of my favourite franchises was no longer what I was looking for in a game. The second is The Old Republic, which technically came out in late 2011 but I didn’t get until Christmas. Again, it had some things I wanted and initially looked like it had an excellent chance to be the obsessive MMO I was looking to replace my WoW addiction with. Then I hit the level cap with my first character and realized there was literally nothing else to do except roll up another class. The storylines are great, but there’s no longevity, and I was done with TOR by mid-year. God, I hope the same doesn’t hold true for 2013, because I already nominated The Last of Us for Game of the Year next year.

Lee Jones (Reader Voice)

5 – Assassins Creed 3 – I Just Can’t Get Into It. I love this series, I’ve stated here in the past that the franchise plays exactly how I like my games but this one has utterly failed to capture me. I’ve not long completed it and I got it on launch day. It just never got better. Worst in the series from my perspective.

4 – Skyrim DLC – What do you mean I still haven’t been able to play it! One of my fav games this gen and I can’t even play all of it due to them not being able to make it work on PS3. Is this some future con to get me to buy a ‘complete’ edition down the line? It gives me flashbacks to waiting for Shivering Isles which STILL has never been released on the EU store. Not amused Bethesda.

3 – Being stuck between a rock and a hard place – I want the gaming industry to stop catering to the casual market but by doing so it would cause mass job loss and the games would suffer for probably a decade. This situation blows. So I have to see my ‘medium’ decline in quality (obviously there are some bright lights out there) in order to make money. I honestly have no problem with them wanting the pre-played market gone and am only a little sad that the physical product will go away, I don’t mind them doing me out of pocket as long as I’m happy with my purchases, what I’m feeling is I’m paying for ‘meh’ experiences that I should be able to enjoy (I believe many would point to Mass Effect 3 as an example here)

2 – Losing old magazines – So a couple of magazines closed down like Nintendo Power and to be honest I was a little saddened but since I wasn’t a loyal reader it largely passed me by but now my main mag PSM3 will be shutting down and I’m feeling the loss. This is the mag I most trust, I’ve read all their issues, played with them and against them, listened to their rambling podcasts and I loved it. I honestly don’t know which mag to turn to now. Suggestions?

1 – Sequels/lack of originality – A constant common grip but one always worth repeating. I play games ALOT, I will give more obscure titles a chance and sometimes even buy games I know will be average at best because they offer something different and yet somehow it feels like I’ve been playing the same games I’ve been playing for years. AND I’M BORED. Maybe this is the reason Creed hasn’t been as good this year, maybe this is the reason I’m so down on the year, but when my main hobby is starting to bore me it’s worrying time. Roll on next gen, give me a reason to be excited again.

Todd Vote (Games Zone Reviewer)

5. Small Number of New, Quality Games – Some will argue this point, and say that we had plenty of quality games. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we didn’t get some good stuff, but can you honestly say we received as much quality this year as we have in the last few years? For every Dishonored, it seemed like there were five games that were just shit.

4.Microsoft has trouble with KI trademark – Seriously, who the hell is going to be confused between this game, and that shitty show that was on fox for less than one whole season? Is the US Patent Office just completely clueless? I’m sure this will be resolved, but still.

3.The Wii U – Like Mr. Randle, I just had a really hard time finding any excitement for Nintendo’s latest console offering. I don’t know if I am maybe just losing interest in gaming, or what the deal is, but I just had little to no enthusiasm for the Wii U. The only thing I found interesting about it was the tablet style controller. But even that wasn’t enough to make me all giddy.

2.Saints Row: Enter the Dominatrix DLC scrapped – Okay, it wasn’t so much scrapped, and this is really more like a bummer followed by a positive, but I still would have liked to have seen this as a standalone spin-off from SRIII. The positive is that it was now announced as being part of Saints Row 4, which was already in development. Of course, now with THQ being in so much trouble financially, we may not ever see that title either… Which brings me to #1

1.Financial Woes Continue – Studios are dropping like flies, publishers are losing money. What the hell is going on? I really hope the next generation rights the ship and helps some of these companies get themselves back on track.

Francisco Ramirez

5. Xbox Fire Pro Wrestling – How do you ruin the most hardcore of wrestling game series? You make it an Xbox Live Arcade game. You change the play-style, now instead of it being all based on timing, which pro wrestling is based on, you rely on button mashing, which would ruin you in a Fire Pro match before. Oh and did I mention it was Avatar based? Yeah, the one series that hardcore fans are dying for an updated or even just HD updated version, and we get this piece of cake, and as GLADOS said, the cake is a lie!

4. Silicon Knights Judgement – When you play with fire, sooner or later you will get burned. Epic and Silicon Knights have been in and out of court since 2007, Epic counter-sued and on November of 2012 Epic won. Silicon Knights have been ordered to destroy anything and everything that used Unreal Engine 3. This included games already in retail like X-Men: Destiny and Too Human, which might make these games collectible at some point.

3. Final Fantasy XIV – I’ve never played an MMORPG simply because I don’t play PC games. I avoided FFXI once it hit the 360 because it was too far in with all the expansions. When FFXIV was announced I read up on it, and decided I might give it a try on the PS3. Well the PS3 version has yet to arrive because a game that was obviously not finished was released for the PC. Did I mention this was in 2010? Yes, Final Fantasy XIV was released on September 30, 2010. It has stumbled now for two years, producer Hiromichi Tanaka left the project, and then the company. It wasn’t until November of 2012 that the game was put down in preparation for the relaunch. Fans are clamoring for a Final Fantasy VII remake, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, Kingdom Hearts 3 and a Chrono sequel. Hell I’d love to see new entries in the Valkyrie Profile and Mana series, but Square Enix is hell bent on making MMO games. Don’t believe me, check out Dragon Quest X for the Wii U.

2. Kingdoms of Amalur Debacle – A baseball star lost his fortune, Rhode Island hasn’t been paid back their loan, and a rookie game company was destroyed, all for creating one damned good game! While the game reviews were all over the place, I for one heavily enjoyed the game. Word was that 38 Studios was already working on a sequel, and not to mention the MMORPG codenamed Copernicus was in the backburner with Big Huge Games. It’s unfortunate, whether you enjoyed the game or not, with Todd Mcfarlane art, and a story by R.A. Salvatore, the one thing that can’t be denied is that KOA was an ambitious project. Everything talked about regarding the sequel sounded great, sadly we might never see that game.

1. Resident Evil 6 – I really wanted to like this game. I was hyped with the trailers, I looked forward to it, and I put in my preorder. The game arrived and I immediately started the Leon and Helena campaign, I enjoyed parts of it, it wasn’t too far of a departure from RE 4 and 5. My question, why in the hell does Resident Evil have to be a multiplayer game? Sure your squadmate isn’t a pain in the ass like RE 5, but they really don’t add anything special either. The Chris and Piers campaign was a little more action heavy, and then my interest started to wain. By the time I went through the Sherry and Jake side of things, I was too overpowered, and was forced to replay and revisit areas that I’d done twice before. The Ada side of things was just like a bonus feature from a movie. Capcom, you made a multiplayer Resident Evil in Operation Racoon City, stop forcing it! One more thing, bring back the Survival Horror aspect, now RE is just another 3rd Person Shooter. God was I disappointed with this!

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